Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis Sermons

Rosh Hashana, 1993

by Harold M. Schulweis

The two pieces of literature I hold in my hand are a secular daily newspaper and an eternal sacred text, the Bible. How do they read together? What background does this biblical text provide for the understanding of the banner headlines that bombard us?

Today, we are challenged to think globally because on Rosh Hashanah we commemorate the creation of the universe and the birth of humankind. These are the days of self-judgment of ourselves and of the world. Think large.

We are less than a sabbatical away from the twenty-first century. How do we judge our century? How do we understand the twentieth century that marked the rise of Nazism, Fascism, Communism and Islamic Fundamentalism? How do we make sense of the traumatic events that have punctuated our century?

Auschwitz, genocide; the Gulag, the Stalinist purges of millions of people; the cultural revolution in China of Mao Tse Tung 1965-1969; Tienemmen Square; the terror of Hamas, Hussein, Hafaz el Asad, Hezbellah; the man-induced starvation in Somalia; the blood baths of Bosnia; the carnage in the Balkans; the collapse of the Evil empire and in its wake the violence in Georgia and the bloody struggles between Armenia and Azerbaijan; and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the resurgence throughout Europe of xenophobia, the hatred of immigrant populations, the rise of racism and anti-Semitism.

What does all this tell us about the nature of man? I mean not about the dictators, the exploiters, the leaders, the commanders who give the orders, but of the masses of followers in our times.  The hundreds of millions of human beings who allow themselves to be sucked up into the vortex of submission, to become part of what Simone Weil called the "Great Beast" - the crowd, the mob, those men and women who enter into a tacit agreement with the devil to become what the Germans called Kadavergehorsam, corpse-like obedience. Who are the followers?

Who is doing the killing? Who is stoking the fires of the crematoria? Who is raping the women, starving the children and maiming the babies? Who are the disciples of the dark side of faith? And speaking of faith, look at the newspapers and consider the ugly reputation of religion —Orthodox Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Croatians, the bloody massacres of Hindus and Muslims; the terror of Catholics and Protestants in Ireland.

And closer to home, how do we understand the phenomena Jonestown and Waco; the willingness of people to drink poison en masse and to allow themselves and their children to be enveloped in flames? Why so willing to blow out the instinct for survival?

I know the conventional wisdom of political scientists and commentators would explain these forms of totalitarianism on the basis of external factors: economic depressions, scarcity of geographic space, racial prejudices, political coercions. Could there be something deeper, internal struggling, at the core of the human spirit that explains the enslavement of our human condition?

This past summer I re-read that chapter from a novel of the late 19th century that many of us, including myself, were assigned to read in college. I was too young to appreciate it. But in re-reading that chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor,” in the last novel of Fyodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov, and more particularly the fifth chapter of part five called “The Grand Inquisitor,” I sensed an important insight in the relationship between human dominance and submission. Dostoevski uses The Grand Inquisitor as representative of the power of the church, though it certainly applies to the power of the state or the political party or the power of the sect. The Grand Inquisitor is modelled after Torquemada, the Spanish 15th century prelate who was responsible for the torture and death of countless numbers of Jews and Muslims.

The Grand Inquisitor has a cynical shrewdness about human nature that pierces our naïveté. He asks what do you think people really want? Do you think that what they want is what they say? They say they want freedom and they go to wars under the banners of freedom and liberty. But don't you understand that men really dread freedom, that they will do anything to escape from freedom, that they want nothing more than to be free of freedom?  “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”  Don't you understand that man fears nothing more than the torment of free choice?

We have been raised with the conceit that men want freedom. The Bible in Deuteronomy (8:3) says: "Man does not live by bread alone but by every word of God." God has given us spiritual manna from heaven. That is our salvation - truth, freedom of choice.

But the Inquisitor taunts us: That is absolutely false. People don't want fiery bread from heaven. Feed men and then ask them virtue. Give them money, give them position, give them security, and they will gladly surrender their freedom. Most people are like Esau prepared to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage, or surrender their birthright for a pot of message? People don't crave freedom.

Isn't the Inquisitor right? Look at the record of the Bible. What happens after the splitting of the seas?  after the manna from heaven? after freedom from the hell of the Egyptian slave camps? The people murmur and complain (Numbers 11:13) "Let us go back to Egypt for we remember the fish, cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, garlic." What about the whips and chains, and dungeons of Egypt and the suppression of religion and of free speech and of slave labor? Forget that. "Tnu lanu basar"—  give us meat. In the time of economic depression in Egypt, what did the Egyptian people plead with Pharaoh?  "Take our cattle, take our land, take our seed. Make us your slaves but feed us."

What do people really want? Not choices, not responsibility, not decision making. They want to be taken care of. They want to obey; they want a controlling master. Fascinating. Again the authors of the Bible repeated it twice, once in Exodus 21:6, once in Deuteronomy 15:17 "If your bondsman says I do not wish to go free because he likes you and your house because he is happy with you, then you shall threaten him and take an awl and thrust it through his ear and into the door and he shall become your slave in perpetuity." The commentator, Rashi, asks why is the ear chosen and he explains: "The ear is chosen because that is the ear that heard at Sinai that we are servants not of any other human being but we are servants only to God." Consider the irony. You have to frighten the slave with an awl to make him want to be free. Why?

The joy of submission, the passion for obedience. The masses are bewitched by three temptations. And those three basic temptations are italicized in Dostoevski's book, Miracle, Mystery, and Authority. That is the real holy trinity before whom man worships.

AUTHORITY

Human nature wants to worship someone. Turn again to the Bible to the episode of the sin before the golden calf. Moses has disappeared and the people cannot function without a master, without a guru. They cannot live with an invisible God. They want a corporeal, tangible God. What do they want?

"They want Messiah now." Have they not heard of false messiahs that devastated and betrayed the Jewish people? Have they not heard of Shabbetai Zvi, or Jacob Frank, or Shlomo Molcho? From the time of the desert they cry "kum asey lanu elohim" –  make us a God. They will make their god, willingly surrender their gold rings and their earrings and everything precious in their lives to be freed of freedom. They want a god.

People want a strong charismatic leader: sometimes a man on a white horse or a man on a donkey - but someone who knows with apodictic certainty the truth about all things. Someone who will tell us what is right and what is wrong and absolutely without qualification. Someone who will give us solidarity and structure, direction and promise us salvation.

Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor reveals our dirty little secret. You see, slavery is not an external event. Authoritarianism is not imposed from chains without. People crave it on their own.

Not because they are mean, but because they are afraid; not because they are strong, but because they are weak; not because they are cowards, but because they are frightened. Because they are lonely.

In the 1880"s the sociologist Emile Durkheim described this human condition as "anomie"– alienation, a lack of purpose and a terrifying fear to be alone. Adolph Hitler, the secular counterpart of the Grand Inquisitor, took political advantage of that alienation. In Mein Kampf, he writes how in the mass rally "the individual who feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people…If he steps for the first time out of the small workshop or out of the big enterprise in which he feels very small into the mass meeting and is surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction, he himself submits to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion." We have seen it. The documentary films of the mass rallies, the uniforms, the unanimous raising of the right hand, the screams from the mob, the fascination with the roar of the mob. "Wenn judenthum von messer sprizt, dann geht nach mehr so voll." While the crowd screams of Deutschland, Deutschland, this small, lonely man whispers to himself "I am uber alles." Underneath his starched medallioned uniform a vulnerable infant in diapers raises his hand.

We crave the leader. Especially at night, in the dark moments of our lives. "Rallies should be held at night,” Hitler wrote, "because in the morning and even during the day men's willpower revolts with highest energy against any attempt at being forced under another's will. In the evening however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will."

Authority, Mystery, Magic and Miracles, lots of political entertainment are associated with the submission to the authoritarian leader. Feelings, ecstasy, thrills - this explains the anti- intellectualism in sects, in cults, in gangs, in authoritarianism. Frightened, alone I gladly empty my will, and submit to a lobotomy of the mind, to a "sacraficium intellectus.”  Who needs to think? who needs to ask? who needs to make decision? who needs to choose?

Make "us" a God. A God for everyone. My God must be your God. You must bow to my God, you must sacrifice to my God, you must pray to my God so that we have indisputable harmony, what the Grand Inquisitor describes as "one unanimous and harmonious ant heap.”  Isn't that the story of the Tower of Babel; in a nutshell the story of making out of all humanity one ant hill. "And the whole earth was one language and one speech. Come let us build us a city and a tower with its top in heaven and let us make us a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth." Community through conformity. Unity through uniformity. Don't you hear it's rattle today? A disdain for the stranger, for the immigrant. Exclusivism is the mark of totalitarianism. Everybody must have one speech and no one can speak another language. No immigrants will be tolerated, no accents, no dialects, no strangers. One language in the world. Melt every culture, dissolve every faith, wear down every language into one golden melting pot.

Beware of monistic mania. Whenever there is one truth, one interpretation, one will, there will be no heart for disagreement. If you disagree, you become the enemy, the antichrist, the apikorus, the unbeliever, the heretic. You are the demon and you will be excommunicated, subject to the edicts anathema and cherem. So in fundamentalist times they buried alive Solomon Rushdie and placed on their death list Nobel Prize novelist Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, and slit the throat of Mohammed Boukobza in the presence of his entire family, the sixth Algerian slain by Islamic fundamentalists, and shot to death the Egyptian writer, Farag Fuda.

Why should we worry about how people chose to lose their freedom? Whether they succumb to totalitarianism or authoritarianism it's their lives isn't it? No it isn't. It's our lives. When the masses surrender their freedom for the promise of security and prosperity, watch out. For as soon as there is the barest whisper of a lower standard of living, hard times, of economic depression, the leader will sic the Great Beast on the sheep and tear out their throats. I recall in the 60's asking an editor of a popular Frankfurt newspaper whether it could happen again. He answered "No, it can't happen again except if there is a depression; then all bets are off." There were six million Germans unemployed in the 1930's. The number six million had its echo in the caverns of the crematoria. They made room for full employment.

There's a terrifying price civilization pays for the surrender of blind obrigkeit, obedience.

Do you not wonder why throughout the Nazi era there were no protests of doctors, businessmen, clergy; no marches in the streets of Stuttgart and Berlin? As Pastor Gruber told me: Do you not realize that if ten thousand people dared to march down the streets, willing to speak out, willing to be jailed, millions of persons and one million souls of Jewish children would be spared humiliation, torture and death? But once you capitulate your freedom to the monster, you lose your will, your heart, your mind. For what is at stake in the global struggle with authoritarianism is the loss of conscience, the loss of critical intelligence, the loss of self respect, and in the end the loss of tolerance and compassion and reason.

What message have we for the citizens of the world and for our own people on the eve of the 21^st century? "Don't die." Don't surrender your mind, your conscience to another for the sake of security or bread or money or power.

The whole of Jewish history is a defiance of the Grand Inquisitor. A repudiation of the temptation of Authority, Mystery and Miracle, whether the authoritarian comes disguised as Fascist or Communist, as potentate or priest, or man or guru, or as Rabbi or Rebbe, you must stand up and cry out: "you are not god. You cannot pray for me, you cannot save me, you cannot bear my obligations. You have not given me life and I will not let you take life from me."

We are not exempt from the lure of fundamentalism and authoritarianism. The prophets battled against submitting to authoritarian power. The whole of Jewish tradition is a struggle against the mystification and deification of the individual.

King David (II Samuel 12:1) from his balcony lusts for Bath Sheba, and manipulates the rules to send off her husband, Uriah, to the front of the battle so that he be killed. After Uriah's death, David, the king can take for himself Bath Sheba. Then Nathan, the prophet arose, told him the story of a rich and powerful man who would not take an animal from his own flock to serve a meal for his guest, but who took instead the only lamb of a poor man and slaughtered it. And David grew angry. "That man is worthy to die." And Nathan said to David, "Thou art the man." And King David broke down and confessed "I have sinned against the Lord."

King Ahab, King of Israel, was jealous of a single owner of a vineyard, Naboth, he conspired to have Naboth murdered so that the king could inherit his property. Elijah the prophet stood before the king: "Have you murdered and will you take possession?" (I Kings 21:19)

Do not capitulate to another and do not be afraid to be alone, to stand alone. "Even through my father and mother forsake me, God will take me under his care." Do not surrender the integrity of your God-given soul for the sake of false camaraderie. That struggle is for the character of Judaism.

On the stone over the grave of Henry David Thoreau, this epitaph appears: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. To see what it could teach me and not when I die to discover that I have not lived.”  Do not be lived by another whether for the bread of plenty, and of the fish of Egypt or mountains of things. Do not die only to discover that you have not lived. Do not grovel before the Grand Inquisitor in his multiple guises. Do not die.

On the brink of a new year, a new era, a new century. "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore choose life that you may live, you and your seed."

* This document, or any portion thereof, may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author.